Skip to main content

Love till morning


Last Christmas I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away This year, to save me from tears I'll give it to someone special

Wham! sang those lines in 1980s. They wouldn’t sing it today. No one wants to give their heart anymore to anyone, it seems. Maybe, there’s no heart anymore.

Situationship has become a regular word in English. 

Relationship is a burden today. Why endure the stress and strain caused by such commitments? Love the skin, enjoy the sex, and say goodbye when you are tired of it. You can have multiple partners too. The New Indian Express tells me [18 Dec 2022] that there many types of relationships (situationships?) among the youth today.  Cookie jar relationship, for example, refers to dating multiple people before deciding who will be better for you even if it is for a few days. Keeping one on the hook because either one of the partners is not ready to commit even for a few days is called benching. Roaching is when you hide from your partner that you have many such partners. There could be more.

The writer of the above Express article claims that this kind of relationships has an advantage: “Allows companions intimacy without commitment.” I wonder whether that is really possible. Can we have any meaningful relationship with another person without some commitment? I feel tremendous commitment even towards my cats! Can you love without commitment?

Well, I guess I belong to another generation altogether. Sometimes when I deal with the young nowadays, I feel that I don’t belong to this galaxy at all.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 431: Last Christmas I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away... Weave a story or write post on the brevity / superficiality of relationships nowadays. #Relationship

 

 

 

Comments

  1. JaiDecember 21, 2022 at 8:02 AM

    You are absolutely right, Tom. Even I cannot imagine any intimacy without any commitment in the relationship or situationship or whatever. I guess we have become too old to understand the kind of things the younger generations come up with. On the other hand maybe the younger generations are too young to understand the value of a relationship with true commitment.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 21, 2022 at 9:26 AM

      I'm absolutely convinced that i have become a kind of scarecrow among the young generation 😊

      Delete
  2. Rajeev MoothedathDecember 21, 2022 at 2:18 PM

    An interesting piece...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yamini MacLeanDecember 21, 2022 at 4:58 PM

    Hari Om
    What is being discussed is the difference between lust and Love. Far too often the former is taken as being the latter. The freedoms of today are a treasure, for sure... but with freedom comes the responsbility of avoiding licentiousness. That requires engaging one's intellect... not that often to the fore when hormones are raging! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 21, 2022 at 6:55 PM

      True, it's lust vs love and the youngsters are failing to draw the necessary line.

      Delete
  4. parwatisingariDecember 22, 2022 at 11:02 AM

    Tomichan you nailed it again. unfortunately the word intimacy was not understood either us, or the generation before us, intimacy is not about sex... it is about feeling safe in a relationship. Essentially kids are so bubble wrapped that they don't know intimacy. forget with another, they are not comfortable with themselves either.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 22, 2022 at 1:10 PM

      Most of my students loved their Covid masks. When the air became safe enough to remove the mask, these students didn't. I asked whether they feared the virus or themselves more. Most were honest to tell me that they kept the mask as a self-defense mechanism. So, you're right, they are not comfortable with themselves and that leads a lot of problems.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
122 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...
39 comments
Read more

Goodbye, Little Ones

They were born under my care, tiny throbs of life, eyes still shut to the world. They grew up under my constant care. I changed their bed and the sheets regularly making sure they were always warm and comfortable. When one of them didn’t open her eyes after a fortnight of her birth, I rang up my cousin who is a vet and got the appropriate prescription that gave her the light of day in just two days. I watched each one of them stumble through their first steps. Today they were adopted. I personally took them to their new home, a tiny house of a family that belongs to the class that India calls BPL [Below Poverty Line]. I didn’t know them at all until I stopped my car a little away from their small house, at the nearest spot my car could possibly reach. They lived in another village altogether, some 15 km from mine. Sometimes 15 km can make a world of difference. A man who looked as old as me had come to my house in the late afternoon. “I’d like to adopt your kittens,” he said. He...
6 comments
Read more